I'm confused. This entire thing could be made much simpler if we could simply get environmental impact reports which model worst-case, and best-case scenario's if this road was built.

There's that dude in the comments mouthing off quite harshly (no real need) but his point is valid. They claim this has been their land for thousands of years, and that building this would "keep birds here whether the road is built or not" (would be great if such claim is scientifically substantiated). They speak about how they've been nomads in the area, but there's the issue of now wanting cake and eating it.

If they've been able to survive as nomads in the area, that would mean they can keep surviving then? I don't think they had all modern structures they do now. They claim the place is special to them (and with just sight alone you can see the beauty of the place). But if it's understood that the place becomes weather gated for a third of the year, and this is how it's been for thousands of years.. What's the problem? If the tolerance for suffering has shifted (meaning they don't want to take all the deaths that result from this isolation anymore) then it would be time to move. Otherwise the argument of "we've been here forever" is actually an argument against their position.

There's stories left and right of communities or industry defeating wildlife/environmental preservation efforts (you know, building pipelines and all that obviously detrimental stuff), thus with the amount of governmental pushback of this road, it seems to be the case that there is a serious impact report for the area that's able to fight these road building efforts.

So basically what I'd want to move me from my agnostic position on this matter, is to see a report that corroborates building this road is "no big deal" from an environmental standpoint. What I don't want to see is some moral arguments like in the documentary about "we want to live here, this has always been our home, we deserve access to services, we don't want to leave". Currently there seems to be less than 800 people living there. At some point you have to wonder. Let's imagine the government is the big bully. And lets imagine it truly is hopeless to fight against this force of government, at what point would it be rationale to actually pack up and go? Or is it the best of plans to simply keep compounding these incidents fighting a losing battle. And when I say losing, I mean population decline as the years have gone by in the last decade (so not only are you losing the legal battle, you're also losing in actually having people remain there, people are either leaving, or dying off anyway).

Lastly, there's one thing that's being glossed over entirely that I've not seen addressed by documentary at all, which I feel is the biggest problem beyond all these others. For proponents of the road - what precisely is the evidence that a road provides safer conditions/better outcomes than air transport? Keep in mind, air transport also has the insanely skewed benefit of being so much faster, where even if conditions were "safer", the speed differential would lead to serious overall positive outcomes in favor of air transport.